1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a multi-video recorder intended for use in, for example, super-markets, banks, etc. in monitoring at many spots and in recording/reproducing the pictures of such spots.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Recently, increasingly many field including super-markets, banks, manufacturing plants, etc. have come to employ multiple TV cameras at various spots such as shops or counters, windows, automated production lines, etc., respectively, in order to monitor and record the pictures of such spots by switching the TV cameras sequentially from one to another at predetermined time intervals. In thee multi-video recorder systems used for the above-mentioned purposes, the picture signals from the TV cameras are sequentially selected and recorded usually into a single video tape recorder (will be referred to as "VTR" hereinafter) for a predetermined period of time (time shared recording).
In the conventional multi-video recorder system consisting of, for example, 10 units of TV cameras and one unit of VTR used in combination for monitoring at 10 spots and recording the pictures of such spots, assuming that one TV camera is to be in action for a time period of, for example, 3 sec, a TV camera once put into action for monitoring and recording is put into service for the same purpose in 30 sec. from its preceding service. That is, each camera can provide video information only for 30 sec. at intervals of 3 seconds, so that only discrete information can be obtained at the time of reproducing the recorded video information. Accordingly any event that occurred during recording by any other TV camera cannot be known. So, to solve this problem, it was necessary to reduce the number of TV cameras used in such multi-video recorder system.
Also there was a problem of taking a rather long time to select the video information from any one of the TV cameras at the time of picture reproduction for editing a series of monitoring video data.